The invention pertains to the field of telecommunications and, more particularly, to a packet switch for a transfer of data in asynchronous mode in a digital transmission network, which can be used notably in an integrated data services network designed for the transmission of data of different origins, at greatly differing throughput rates, the different services being capable of using data throughput rates that vary in a broad range. Such a system is commonly known as the "broad band" ISDN "system".
The asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) has been chosen by standards committees as an underlying transport technology within many broad band integrated services digital network protocol stacks. A description of the standardized ATM telecommunications concept can be found in a publication of the ATM forum entitled "ATM user-network interface specifications", 1993, published by PTR Prentice Hall.
ATM switching systems are required to maintain running counts of the cells that are processed on each virtual connection. ATM switching systems usually also store indications of various events that are detected by processing the cell flow of the virtual connections. The number of virtual connections using a single physical link typically numbers in the tenth of thousands. The invention therefore is aimed to provide an improved ATM line card and method for handling such data like cell counts and event indications which are stored in the connection memory.